111: From $40K in Debt to $100M+ in Real Estate with Justin Colby

Today, I’m sitting down with Justin Colby, a real estate investor, coach, and founder, whose coaching program “The Science of Flipping” has helped thousands of students launch, grow, and scale their real estate investing businesses.

Over the past 16 years, Justin has flipped more than 2,600 homes, and he currently aims to buy 2 to 5 homes each week.

Soon after starting as a realtor, Justin found himself at the mercy of the 2008 market crash. In debt, out of work, and sleeping on a couch, he managed to borrow $25,000 from a friend to pay for real estate coaching. Fast forward to today, and Justin has been involved in more than $100 million in real estate transactions.

In today’s episode, you’ll hear how Justin views the real estate market and how different investing strategies benefit different investing goals. You’ll also hear how he launched a successful coaching program, his 5 principles of success, and hard-earned lessons from losing millions of dollars in deals over the years.

Inspiring Quotes

• “People can make a lot of money, but if they don’t have a skill set to lean back on in tougher times, they just fall and crash.” – Justin Colby

• “It’s always a lack of resourcefulness, never a lack of resources.” – Justin Colby

• “Everyone in the universe should be buying at least one rental per year.” – Justin Colby

• “Income is not raising at the same rate as appreciation values of homes — but people are going to have to live places.” – Justin Colby

• “Providing great content to the right people is the recipe.” – Justin Colby

• Making $500K at age 22 through B2B sales
• Justin’s 5 principles of success
• The internal wiring of outlier entrepreneurs
• Lessons from losing millions in real estate
• How to start rehabbing properties
• Switching from rehabbing to wholesaling
• Building a coaching business from scratch
• Wholesaling vs. rehabbing vs. buy-and-hold
• Adjusting your strategy to bad markets
• How Justin grew a Top 10 business podcast

Brad Weimert: Justin Colby, what’s happening, man?

Justin Colby: What’s up brother?

Brad Weimert: I have never talked to you about business at all. Well, no, maybe a little bit. But I know you socially, I see you all over the place. And I’m now finding you in Miami at this studio that you have highlighted for me. So, I appreciate you coming out, man.

Justin Colby: Dude, this is a blast. Even the last handful of minutes, we were chatting and finding out more about you than I knew. And it’s easy to socialize and kind of bro out with someone and then getting undercover and under their history, it’s kind of cool to learn.

Brad Weimert: My favorite way to meet people is with no business contact because there’s no presupposition. Now, actually, there’s a qualifier there, which is that in certain rooms that you’re in, you know that people are performers by nature. And I like that. And then I like not knowing anything because then you get to know the person.

Justin Colby: It’s funny, and I hate to say, but it’s just the reality, the socialization of being at a bar. You and I are part of similar masterminds, but again, we’re always kind of socializing. We’re never really talking business. That whole aspect really to me, creates a lot of connectivity, right? And you don’t need to go drinking beer. I’m not saying you got to go take shots and blackout drunk. I’m just saying like that social connection starts everything and that’s where it goes. And that’s why we’re here, right? I mean, that’s the reality.

Brad Weimert: Yeah. Speaking of, we’re both living in sort of sober January land, kind of. And I’m violating my rule and having a drink.

Justin Colby: There you go.

Brad Weimert: And you are staying strong, which I appreciate. So, on to business, people know you for real estate and stuff. What I have dug into and found out is that since you started, you have done more than 2,500, 2,600 transactions in the last 15, 16 years, which is wild. So, I want to dig into, I want to kind of get up to that point, but before we get there, can you give me kind of foundation how you got into business, how you started?

Justin Colby: So, the story goes, it was painful. So, when the market crashed back in 2007, 2008…

Brad Weimert: That’s when you got in? So did I.

Justin Colby: It crashed. Crashed hard. So, I was a realtor prior to that. So, I graduated UCLA, never went out and got a job, went directly into sales. And that sales career, which was my business, moved me to Boston, Massachusetts. It was door-to-door sales. Some real skill set selling business services. So, it’s door-to-door businesses, right? Credit card processing.

Brad Weimert: Look at you.

Justin Colby: Eagle First was the company.

Brad Weimert: Nice.

Justin Colby: UPS, Verizon Wireless, that kind of stuff, right? And so, I caught pneumonia. So, I’m a California boy, born and raised in the Bay area. And so, I literally was on– I went to the doctor because I was so sick, so long that I’m like, yikes, not great. So, the doctor was like, “Dude, full-blown pneumonia. You have a couple choices. You need several weeks of bedrest, or you could probably take a week or so in here and we’ll kind of pump you through whatever.” I’m like, “I have no health insurance. That’s not going down.”

Long story short, fast forward, moved back home. My buddy calls. At the same time, he had no idea and says, “Hey, do you want to start this real estate brokerage we talked about in college?” “Yes, I do,” because I just gave up my sales company, got into real estate. His dad was a home developer. I literally would sell his new home builds, I call it like I was a monkey. I would sit behind a desk, I would take all the offers and I would just choose the highest one. I had no skill set. I had no training. I had no salesmanship. I didn’t know how to build a book of business. I had nothing, I just knew I was making a lot of money because of this, right time, right place, no skill set, which is part of why I built such a big education platform because I realize, people can make a lot of money, but if they don’t have a skill set to lean back on in tougher times, they just fall and crash.

Brad Weimert: All right, hold on. I got to ask you some questions on this. So, being door-to-door B2B, first of all, and then moving into real estate, it sounds like there wasn’t a ton of deliberate thought behind this, just right time, right place.

Justin Colby: None. Zero. Right time, right place, I mean, literally, I was at my aunt and uncle’s house. In bed, I get a text, “Hey, you ready to get going on this real estate thing?” Because we talked about it a lot in college. His dad was a developer. “Hey, bro, when we graduate, we should do this build.” And he has no idea I’m home because I’m bedridden. I’m really ill. I’m 6’4. Right now, I probably weigh 205. I was like 160.

Brad Weimert: Wow.

Justin Colby: I was not great.

Brad Weimert: Okay, so my question here is B2B door-to-door, B2B versus B2C, anyway, from a sales perspective is very different. Did you gravitate towards one or the other? Did you find yourself in a position where you felt like you were getting success somewhere, because you said you’re order taking basically?

Justin Colby: Well, the order taking was in the real estate. So, when I broke into that, that was just a function of my buddy’s dad was a developer. And they needed sales agents.

Brad Weimert: How did you do in the B2B thing?

Justin Colby: I was great. The challenge in the B2B is you got to build a real business and build a team and an infrastructure, a daily routine, right? So, interestingly enough, it’s super like boiler room, where you come in in the morning early, you get rah-rah, let’s go, let’s go, win, fight, crawl, scratch. Let’s go create and the motivation to get out of the door. And then all the salespeople go to the door, knock 100 doors a day. You’re looking for one sign-up a day. These are the metrics, right? And you’re getting paid $100 as a commission, $100 one time as a sales rep. And you do credit card processing. So, you know the money that goes into it, and then you first would pay us 100 bucks one time to get a new client.

Brad Weimert: Wow.

Justin Colby: I mean great for Eagle First. So, that skill set didn’t translate into me being a realtor at the time because I literally sit behind a desk as a realtor. People would be giving me 10 offers, 15 offers a day because it’s back in 2006. The market’s on fire. Free money everywhere. If you had a heartbeat, you were getting a loan. So, the transition of skill set didn’t transition. I, today, probably use more of that skill set than I did then, right? But as the market crashed, I crashed. And so, this was effectively kind of my second crash. So, I gave up my sales business because I can’t really sell a door-to-door. Who wants to buy that? The owner’s leaving. He’s dying. Technically, I’ve had health issues. So, I gave it up. I was making 500 grand a year, early 20s, like, way too much money.

Brad Weimert: Damn. Really?

Justin Colby: Oh, man, we were good. But it’s way too much money for a 22-year-old out of college you’d be making, right?

Brad Weimert: It’s too much money if you haven’t been taught what to do with it and how to behave. And we have such a crazy lack of financial literacy in our educational systems, in the institutions that teach our kids that, yes, when you’re 22 and you make 500 grand, it’s problematic more than helpful.

Justin Colby: Yeah. And I didn’t have any. I mean, I come from a very middle-class family, never wanted much, but never really had much. Just normal, right? And so, I had no education behind it. And so, don’t have anything to show for it, of course. Vegas has it all. So, then I go into that, again, kind of fast forward and build a skill set around being an agent. So, when the market did crash instead of, like, relying on my book of business and clients, I had nothing. I didn’t even know how to canvas territory to go generate new clients. I just had nothing.

But I did love real estate. I just didn’t know if I wanted to be like a chauffeur, if you will. And for all the realtors out there, I apologize, but it just wasn’t my thing to kind of cater all the time. But it was just when, like, the very first show, like Flip This House, I think, with Than and the boys, I think it was just about this time.

Brad Weimert: Yeah, there were clients in their heyday for us too. I love those guys.

Justin Colby: Yeah, of course.

Brad Weimert: Yeah, gangster.

Justin Colby: So, I don’t think anything, I had to make a decision on what I wanted to do, and I was broke. I lost it all, home to foreclosure. Repo man took my car. Sleeping on a couch. I’m 25 years old, right? And I was like, “What do I do?” But I loved real estate, and obviously, everyone was well aware of the millionaires and billionaires that have real estate and portfolios, etc. I’m like, “I just think real estate’s a move.” And at that time, I was invited to one of those big seminars, FortuneBuilders.

Brad Weimert: Oh, nice. It was a fortune. Nice.

Justin Colby: And it was the one with Preston Ely, launching his, whatever it was.

Brad Weimert: FreedomSoft?

Justin Colby: FreedomSoft, yeah.

Brad Weimert: Crazy. Small world.

Justin Colby: Yeah. This is way back in the day. And so, listen, I was broke, but the event did the trick, meaning it got me to where I needed to be. I made a call to a friend, said, “Hey, I need to borrow $25,000 for some coaching.” I have none of it. And he took a bet on me and said, “All right, dude, I trust you. I believe you can go do it.” Got a $25,000 check. I gave it to them and the way I was at, right now is it. And that was the trajectory of, like, 16 years later, here I am on your podcast. And so, there’s a lot in the middle there. But to keep it short is I came from like when people create excuses of why they can’t succeed, I just go, “Brother, you’re talking to the guy.” I could have created all the excuses, right? Living on my friend’s couch, no income, 40 grand of credit card debt, credit score gone, repo man literally came and took my car, foreclosed– like, I had it all. I could easily have gone the excuse route.

And so, it’s always a lack of resourcefulness, never lack of resources. And so, people need to figure out what they want and then commit to it, right? And so, I have kind of five principles I rely on. The first two is decide what you want and who you need to be to get it, and then commit to it. And if you do that, you take a lot of action around that and you can build something special.

Brad Weimert: I feel like those two principles. What are the other three?

Justin Colby: Oh yeah, the other three, so the first one is like almost 2 in 1. But decide what you want, who you need to be to get it, right? So, I combine that. Number two is then you got to commit to that thing. So, you got to decide what the hell you want. That’s not easy. That’s not like…

Brad Weimert: It’s not.

Justin Colby: Hey, Brad, what do you want? Oh, I want to– you don’t flippantly say, I want to be the biggest credit card processor in the world, right? That may be your goal, but you don’t just flippantly say that. Because then who Brad needs to be to get to that level would probably not be the Brad right here, right now, because you’d be a lunatic at that point. You’d have to be like an Elon Musk. So, I say that to say, then you got to go commit to that. What do you want? And then the breaking point is taking the action needed to achieve it.

So, number three is taking a lot of action. Break sh*t. Do it wrong. Do it wrong enough, long enough to learn what the right thing is to do. Like, you’re going to f*ck it up along the way. It’s not going to go well. You’re going to make mistakes. Sh*t’s going to break. Cool. Go. Go do that, right? There’s no other way to do it.

Number four is be extremely uncomfortable because every day that you’re doing something new, you should be uncomfortable because it’s new. So, by definition, you’re going to be outside your comfort zone because you’ve never done it before, right? So, I know that sounds obvious, but I think it’s a limiting factor belief that people don’t want to do that, but they want something new. And I’m like, “Then just be uncomfortable. Deal with it. Just deal with it.”

And then number five, in my opinion, I believe this is the most important one. So, I call it, I got to come up with a better name, but you got to remove your time result expectations. So, time result expectation. So, when are you going to achieve it? People would put some stupid arbitrary time on sh*t. It’s always arbitrary because it’s a round number. Even goals, I think. F*ck it. Five-year goal, ten-year goal, yearly goal, like goals should be changed personally, but to talk about the time results, so on my space of real estate, when someone comes into my community, The Science of Flipping, the first thing they think is, “Okay, I’m going to get a deal in 30 days because Justin’s coaching me in the community. He’s helping,” right? Is it possible? 100%.

But I basically, if I ever have the chance to enroll someone, they somehow get to me directly and they say, “I want to get a deal done the first 30 days,” I won’t allow them into a role, which sounds counterintuitive because it’s a business, you have to create income. But I know that on day 31, they will quit, they will complain, and they will blame me for why they didn’t. They will not look in the mirror because that’s our human condition. Now, it’s easier to point the finger and blame than it is to actually look in the mirror and say, “Oh, it’s actually because I didn’t make any calls,” right? That’s the hard part.

And so, your time expectation on the result you’re trying to achieve shouldn’t be any. So, I’ve been very vocal recently about becoming a billionaire. I will become a billionaire. And then I pause, just like I did. Look at you in the eye because I didn’t say when or how fast, I just said, I’m going to do this. Now, if it takes me 10 years, 20 years, 30 years, 40 years, 50 years, whatever, so be it. I’m going to put my head down and I’m going to create that specifically me through real estate in fun new little ventures. I’m getting into tech, which I didn’t know how I was going to get in tech. But as a side story, we’re going to talk about here, but…

Brad Weimert: I have lots of…

Justin Colby: And by the way, if I don’t achieve becoming a billionaire and I get halfway there…

Brad Weimert: You’ll be okay.

Justin Colby: Doing okay. If I get a quarter way there, not so pissed.

Brad Weimert: All right. So, I have a question on that. So, I understand the construct and the reality for me with goal setting and timelines is very often, I don’t meet them on time, but I meet them. And I go, I look back on life and track the activities, track the behaviors, and see that a lot of sh*t just happened. They only happen because I put the goal out there in the first place and aim for it. And it’s sort of this shoot for the stars, hit the moon thing, or whatever that analogy is.

Justin Colby: Yeah. It’s one of the other.

Brad Weimert: Something like that.

Justin Colby: I don’t know what’s farther. I guess the stars are farther. Superstars land on the moon.

Brad Weimert: Something like that. But the question is, how do you reconcile that idea of it’s not about the timeline with still having enough pressure and constraints to execute quickly?

Justin Colby: So, that’s a little bit the entrepreneur part, where it is a lot easier to be an employee.

Brad Weimert: Yes.

Justin Colby: No real goals. The boss says you need to achieve this thing. You just work until you achieve it and they tell you what you need to achieve. So, you don’t have to think or push or whatever. You just got to get it done. Okay. What we do and how– it’s a great question for the military or entrepreneurs, just like, how do you create the energy, the desire, or the commitment? It’s because you got to go back to number one. What do you want to achieve? What do you want to create? What is that?

So, if we’re talking about goals, whatever that may be, okay, that’s what I want. Who do I need to be to get that? What do I need to be saying? Where do I need to be? Who do I need to meet? How much do I need to work? What do I need to be focused on? Who do I need to be? And if you can create that type of thing, that’s why committing and taking action in the next two is because there’s a little something wrong with us entrepreneurs to set goals the way we set them because now, we have to go do them. And that’s where the rubber meets the road. That’s why not everyone’s meant to be an entrepreneur. It’s f*cking hard. Really hard. Like, it’s more dog sh*t sandwiches than it is medals and rewards.

Brad Weimert: No question about it.

Justin Colby: And so, for people, all I can say is you really need to connect the what do I want and who do I need to be to get it. I’m not going to go the West Coast woo-woo, what’s your why, right? Because I feel like at this point, that’s so watered down, like everyone answers the same thing. It’s my kids and creating a legacy. Fine. What do you really want out of this life? Like, I kind of reverse engineer. We only have one of these f*cking lives. This is it. It’s not practice. We have one time. What do I want? Like, for some, playing mediocre is okay. I don’t judge that person. It’s not for Brad. It’s not for Justin, right?

Brad Weimert: I do a little bit, but keep going.

Justin Colby: Well, sure. But you’re already in the 1%.

Brad Weimert: Yeah. And I say that somewhat playfully because I don’t think judgment is bad. Just for me, I would judge myself. I do judge myself when I land in the space of mediocrity.

Justin Colby: But you and I are definitely the same. We’re wired differently. Yeah, I don’t think this is…

Brad Weimert: I just, I guess what I would say is, yes, we’re wired different, and I choose to look at gen pop as not mediocre, but as long as they’re living deliberately, which most aren’t, do whatever the f*ck you want.

Justin Colby: That’s right.

Brad Weimert: The people that clock in at eight and leave at five, staff, and cherish the time after five where they’re totally disconnected, I love and respect that if it’s a choice. But when it’s not a choice, then it’s mediocrity. When it’s not a choice and they’re not controlling their own life and making the decision, that’s what I judge.

Justin Colby: So, the only thing I don’t like about any of it is when people complain about it, even if it’s not a choice. So, I think it’s all a choice, frankly.

Brad Weimert: I agree.

Justin Colby: Right?

Brad Weimert: Yeah.

Justin Colby: And so, I would sit here and say, even those people who say they don’t have a choice, have a choice. They’re making a choice to not make a choice.

Brad Weimert: Sure, sure. Not making a decision is making a decision.

Justin Colby: That’s it. And so, I would just say like, sometimes, I say, “Honey, I’m going to turn into Tom Cruise in Cocktails and I’m going to the beach to serve drinks because I’m done. Mentally, I’m it. Because, like, no brains, no headaches. Yeah, we’re going to live in a one-bedroom studio apartment on the beach in some Tahiti or something, and we won’t have all the cool things. But I don’t have to, like, every night, I get to come home and just sit with you guys and play and whatever, right? So, that’s okay because it’s a choice to do it.

Brad Weimert: Right.

Justin Colby: So, we need to be able to understand that everyone has the same of, and you know, I just got in a dialog, let’s call it, about this because I think it is all a choice and everyone does have the same opportunity. I’m not saying everyone has as much money or whatever, and we could go as polarizing if you want to talk about it, right? Do the people in Haiti have the same opportunity as people in the United States? I’m not necessarily going there. But I would argue, if you were born in the United States, in large part, we all have the same opportunity, in large part, right? You just have to make a decision to go do it, go after it, go for the thing you want and don’t allow society to limit us. Like, it’s just not easy. That’s the challenge, it’s like whether it’s the judgment or the societal disagreement of the way you want to do it or whatever, like, it’s just not the easy thing to do. So, you got to push through that part.

Brad Weimert: Yeah, I think, I mean, there are booby traps all over the place with language around this.

Justin Colby: Of course. But I try to be as…

Brad Weimert: I generally steer clear of absolutes. But if we want to stick with this frame, I would say everybody has the same opportunities, but they just have different starting conditions. And so, there are more hurdles for many people to get to that opportunity, to get to that starting line than others.

Justin Colby: That’s right.

Brad Weimert: But you have a choice as a human of whether or not you’re going to take ownership of that and push through anyway or not. And that’s the truism, right? That’s the absolute, is ultimately it’s still f*cking up to you. And as a person, I actually am very accepting of all, meaning I wasn’t trying to be polarizing. And I’m just saying it is just a choice. That’s the thing I do believe. If you choose not to, awesome. I love you. I’ll hug you. I’ll support you. Just don’t f*cking complain. All right, so let’s pull it back to real estate here. So, you go through a FortuneBuilders course and you magically get rich.

Justin Colby: Magic. It’s like it falls off the tree and you go, yes.

Brad Weimert: So, tell me about, from a real estate investment perspective, I want to talk info and I want to talk real estate investment. But let’s start with real estate investment because that’s where you started and that’s where good people that are selling education on real estate always start. Because if you don’t know how to do it, how the f*ck are you going to teach it? Not well is the answer. So, what kind of real estate investment? Why did you pick that specific thing? And what was the path there?

Justin Colby: So, I went path of least resistance. So, I lived in San Francisco on a couch and the Bay Area, still to this day, is largely one of the more expensive places to buy a real estate, right? And so, I understood, like, if I’m broke, it’s really hard to kind of whittle your way into saying, “Yeah, I’d like to make an offer on this $4.8 million home that is 3,000 square feet.” You know what I mean? So, during that time, Phoenix was just getting destroyed with values, right?

And so, my friend and business partner, we decided to go into business together to say, because he was losing his job too at KB Home. He had a job. And we’re like, “Why don’t we do this investing thing in Phoenix because these homes now are like $50,000?” They used to be like 200. Just got decimated. Lower barrier of entry. Now, we didn’t even have 50 grand. But the point being is, the value could make it a little bit easier to find people with 50 grand.

Brad Weimert: Yeah. To get into it.

Justin Colby: That’s right.

Brad Weimert: And this is just post collapse. So, this is…

Justin Colby: This is eight, nine, ten.

Brad Weimert: Okay, great.

Justin Colby: And so, I went into single-family homes. And I still do a lot of single-family homes still to this very day. I’ll personally buy anywhere from two to five homes a week currently, right now. We just closed on a 22-door apartment complex last week. So, I’m getting more into commercial. I just bought a 584-door in Houston, Texas with some partners, which is really cool. So, I am getting more into the commercial side. I have a storage facility now that I bought last year, but I still love single-family. And here’s why, as we’re recording this right now, the big boy money, Blackstone just came in with some huge number. Don’t quote me exactly but something like $1.3 billion, I think, might even be more to go buy out another hedge fund that had 38,000 single-family homes under management.

Why would they do that? Because they believe in the single-family home model. They realize population is growing faster in homebuilding. Everyone will need a place to live. People prefer, I guess, single-family homes. And so, they went out and spent all that money to go get 38,000 single-family homes in one purchase. So, for me, I go, let me just follow the money because if they’re not going down more apartments, which they are, but if they’re also veering into the single-family, I’m going to stay in single-family too because I’d love for them to come by my portfolio one day soon, right? And it’s not 38,000 homes. I don’t have that.

So, if they’re willing to do that, I kind of just follow the money. Now, with all that said, I’m 16 years into this business. There’s ebbs and flows and iterations and adaptations of what I’ve done and how I’ve done it. There was a time that I only fixed and flipped. That’s the only thing I did. There was a time I only wholesaled. There was a time I– well, those are the only two others. And then, over the last several years, I realized my biggest mistake was not losing multiple seven figures on a development. I’ve lost millions of dollars. I’m not afraid to share it. I’m vocal about it.

And the reason being is because people need to realize it’s not always puppy dogs and rainbows. It’s not always look how cool I look on Instagram. It’s not all of that. The real deal is like, I’ve taken some big swings of the bat and I’ve lost and I’ve missed. I’ve missed big, but it doesn’t stop me, right? I could have easily folded, easily, right? That’s it. I’m out. I’m going to go Tom Cruise Cocktails on a beach. I didn’t because I committed to what I wanted within investing.

So, I say all that to now, I say like now where I’m at and what I try to coach and educate people on is to be a dynamic real estate investor. Do it all – wholesale, fix and flip, and buy rentals. You should always be building a portfolio. My number one mistake was I didn’t build a portfolio. I was not at least accumulating one home a year, one, for the first 15-year-old, technically, the first 12 years of my business. Now, I’m 16 years in and now, three years ago, I started really buying more rentals.

Brad Weimert: All right. So, that’s the part I want to talk about. So, you just mentioned three strategies but all within single-family – fix and flip, wholesale, buy and hold.

Justin Colby: That’s it.

Brad Weimert: And this is a really important key for people that are looking at real estate investment as a vehicle, whether it’s a vehicle for wealth creation or cash flow, you still were siloed at that point in time in one asset class.

Justin Colby: That’s right.

Brad Weimert: So, different strategies, one asset class. Not to be confused with, do any type of real estate investment that presents itself across all these different asset classes, which is horrifically more complicated.

Justin Colby: Amen. I was just going to say that.

Brad Weimert: And it’s a really important note because it could easily be misinterpreted when you say be dynamic. So, you also mentioned that you had a period of time when you were doing fix and flip, period of time just wholesaling. What was the path there? So, when you started, what did you get out of FortuneBuilders? And where did you start? Wholesaling?

Justin Colby: Or fix and flip, which is ironic, right?

Brad Weimert: It is because wholesaling is the low barrier to entry.

Justin Colby: And I had no money. And it’s like…

Brad Weimert: So, wholesaling for anybody that doesn’t know is basically finding deals, putting a contract on it so that you have the rights to the property and then selling that contract to somebody else who actually wants to do the fix and flip, so rehab. Most of the time, you could apply that label to other asset classes as well but…

Justin Colby: Or landlords, right? Someone who wants to buy it for a rental if you’re selling the contract.

Brad Weimert: Yeah. And fix and flip is what everybody knows as rehab. That’s like the glorified real estate investing thing in the country for anybody. So, all the shows are rehab.

Justin Colby: All the shows, yep.

Brad Weimert: So, you did rehab first. Where did you get money?

Justin Colby: Raised it. And I didn’t know what I was doing, and I just had people. The funny thing about it is people don’t realize how much money they have around them. And like I said, I didn’t come from money. I had a very meager, normal blue collar, like we paid our bills every month, but we didn’t have extra, right? But when I started getting into the space and started talking about it, just with friends like, Colby, what are you doing now? What’s going on? Or how is everything going? I know, you’re– I mean, trust me, I took my eyeroll beatings from all my friends. Like, Colby lost it all. That was definitely there. And I felt it, and I knew it. And that is probably some of the things that push me the way I’m wired when we talk about that wiring is like, I kinda of just want to say, f*uck you. And I have at this point, like, I’ve definitely created something that I don’t have that same feeling.

Brad Weimert: That was f*ck you for those of you that could hear that.

Justin Colby: And so, I would just say, I was talking enough about it that friends and people started being like, want to get involved. And I had one friend specifically that had an inheritance that just was like, “Dude, I have multiple six figures here. Can I be involved in what you’re doing? I don’t have time. I have a job.” I was like, “Yeah. Just start it.” And then you kind of get this reputation or resumé and you’re able to talk about it. And now, this is back in 2000, I mean, we’re seven and eight, right? Meaning social media is not the platform it is today. It was around, but it’s not what it is today.

Brad Weimert: Barely.

Justin Colby: Right? Barely. When did Facebook do like six or seven, something?

Brad Weimert: Yeah.

Justin Colby: So, I say that to say like, if you just actually talk about the things you’re doing and what’s cool and you don’t have to have a platform like a podcast, like just talk about it with friends and family. There is so much money out there, even when you’re broke, busted, disgusted. It’s out there. And I don’t even know the number, but it’s something trillions of dollars in the United States are in retirement accounts. Trillions. It’s just sitting. If you just could show them that there’s an asset that they can invest in, they could be a lender. They can get 10% interest or 12% interest or whatever. Or they could be an equity partner and own it with you. You just need to know and talk about it outwardly. And that’s all I did. I didn’t know what I was doing until I could look back and connect the dots and say, “How the hell did I get money?” Oh, I was talking about it. I was talking about what I was doing, and people wanted to be a part of it to the point of the TV shows, right? Sexy. Easy.

Brad Weimert: Yeah, 100%. Yeah, I mean, that Flip This House sort of launched that era of flipping TV shows and made it sexy. But I think that for a very long time, it’s been real estate as a wealth creation strategy has been discussed amongst successful people, written about in books and the go-to entrepreneurial wealth building books. But those shows popularized it. And they changed the dynamics for it. And I think you’re right, money being around and talking about it, you have to have the confidence to do that. And I think that also, it behooves you to have some idea, and this is a stumbling block for a lot of people, some idea of how to structure those things financially. And so, you rattled off a couple different things that for people that don’t invest, throwing out anything financially related is super scary and complicated.

Justin Colby: No doubt.

Brad Weimert: Right? It’s you talk about returns, you talk about different equity strategies, you talk about funds. And most of those words just break communication because they don’t know where to go with that.

Justin Colby: Yeah, that’s right.

Brad Weimert: Did you pick that stuff up from FortuneBuilders from a course?

Justin Colby: They definitely taught. That’s how I was able to educatively talk about it is they were able to show me what the model was.

Brad Weimert: Yeah, awesome.

Justin Colby: And simplify it, right? Saying things like, “Hey, as a lender, you’d be the bank.” You mean, first position or second position? Well, banks have a first position loan. Sometimes they have a second or a HELOC. So, it helped put it into kind of normal terms. And people just got it, and they’re just like, “I want that kind of return.” Again, this is years ago.

Brad Weimert: Love it. So, why did you switch to flipping?

Justin Colby: Switched from flipping to wholesaling?

Brad Weimert: That’s right.

Justin Colby: So, I started flipping and I got to wholesaling because the hedge funds came into Phoenix and started buying everything they could, the county courthouse steps. And that’s where I was buying a lot of my deals is county court– it was actually the only place I was buying our deals was the county courthouse steps.

Brad Weimert: The only one thing is going to foreclosure.

Justin Colby: That’s right. And so, when you can’t buy, that means you can’t sell, which means you can’t make any money. So, it was a brutal transition, again, adapting through different phases and iterations. And so, we realized we needed to go find another way to get deals. Well, there were already people wholesaling in Phoenix. So, we started buying from them. We found them. We’d started going out, I started networking, I started going to these little meeting things. There was no meetup.com, called REIA meetings. And we started buying and found some wholesalers.

Brad Weimert: Again, for those that are not entrenched in the real estate space, it’s Real Estate Investment Associations, which are typically local groups. They’re always local groups, city by city, state by state that aggregate real estate investors and little business models, but they’re to help teach the community how to invest in real estate insurance deals.

Justin Colby: Yep. And so, would go there, network. I’m very easygoing. I can talk to anyone. So, it was not scary for me. And I know it is for a lot of people, but that’s part of my skill set is like, you could just go, “Hey, what’s going on? What do you do? What’s your business model?” And so, I found enough of them that we started buying again. And then we started seeing their assignment fees. And again, you’re assigning paperwork as a wholesaler, right? So, they’re not buying it. They’re assigning their contract in their terms of that contract over to me for a fee. Some of them are making $40,000, $50,000, $60,000 on one deal. And it fits our buy box in terms of should we buy it? But then we’re seeing all this margin that we could be having on the end, and we’re taking all the risks. So, that’s what really, like we did, how many? 10, 20, 30 wholesale deals that we bought before we kind of woke up and like, “Why don’t we just go get our own?”

Brad Weimert: Why don’t we find them ourselves?

Justin Colby: And so, we went into direct mail. It was really, really big back at the time. We went into direct mail really heavy, started getting our own. But we also realized the exit, right? So, the long tail of a flip sucks. It can get you in the cash cycle issues, and so…

Brad Weimert: Meaning that you have to sell it at some point and you have to actually do renovation.

Justin Colby: That’s right. And so, you’re buying it, you’re rehabbing it. It’s not selling it. You bought another one. So, you’re bringing all this capital. But then the exit is so long on a rehab that like, all of a sudden, you have no money and you can’t pay yourself. And you’re like, I’m going to eat Top Ramen again. I’m not making all this money, I’m not yet because it’s all stuck in these houses. So, that forced our hand to say, “Okay, we need to start bringing in cash.” So, what we started doing is we started actually wholesaling it to ourself, so we could go make five grand on the front end, pay ourselves a couple bucks.

Brad Weimert: Interesting.

Justin Colby: Which is five grand. Sometimes, we do 10 grand. I mean if it’s a big deal, we’d take 10 grand, wholesale it to ourselves, have five grand or have 10 grand, and then still do the rehab, which led us into like, why are we even dealing with rehab? These contractors suck. Why don’t we just sell it? Why don’t we become a wholesaler? So, then it led into that, right?

Brad Weimert: Yeah. Okay, so some of the mechanics of this are, for people that don’t wholesale and do the real estate thing, and I hate to get too granular, but from a wealth perspective or from a startup perspective, you’re doing this and you’re brand new, trying to figure it out or you are a business person that has a successful business and you’re looking for a strategy to do it, understanding the mechanics is valuable. So, when you’re looking for real estate deals, you have a few paths. One is you can work with a realtor that works with investors. That’s one path. And that’s, I think, the starting point for a lot of people.

The other is you could look for wholesalers, and these are people that have figured out how to go find the properties. But like you just said, they don’t want to rehab them, right? They don’t want to deal with it. Or they don’t have the skill set, expertise, capital, etc. They find the deals and sell them and make a little margin. The third is that you figure out how the wholesalers are finding the properties. And your answer to that was direct mail, initially. And so, that’s basically saying, that’s being very clear back to your five principles, being very clear on the outcome that you’re after. In this case, that means being very clear on the criteria. And you reference it as the box that you’ll buy in, the criteria that you’re going to use to invest, and then just f*cking hunting, blanketing everybody, saying, hey, are you open to selling your property until the people come through? And then you look at whatever the numbers are, 10, 20 people respond to the direct mail and say, I’m interested. Of that, one of them or two of them has a deal that might fit the box. All fair so far?

Justin Colby: All fair.

Brad Weimert: So, you did the wholesaling thing for a while. How much of this did you do before you got into education? And where were you from a financial perspective at this point?

Justin Colby: I mean, I don’t know if I could give you an exact benchmark, but we were making well in the high six figures, I would guess, before I got into the education space. So, in 2014, a good friend Sean Terry, he and I just were both in Phoenix, and we did a bunch of deals together, and he’s just like, “Bro, start a podcast.” And I was listening to his podcast at the time, and I was like, “Dude, I want to do this. This is fun.” And the history of that, for me personally, just to get to know me a little bit better, as a kid, I thought I was going to be a teacher.

So, my grandmother was a teacher, then a principal, and then like one of those school district types, where they would start to help the school system. So, I tell my grandma, “I’m going to be a teacher, grandma,” and she is all proud. And then the older I got, I was like, “They don’t make any money,” right? This is true. And then, so I told her I was going to be a psychologist or a psychiatrist. And then I realized how much school they had to go to, specifically psychiatrist. So, like, that’s not quite as much fun.

But I always had this teacher, go-giver coach. I was a big athlete. And so, from athletics, I would get into coaching or refereeing. I was always a part of that, right? And so, that was just kind of ingrained in me. I always wanted to give. So, in 2014, I thought that would be a cool way to do it. Go create a podcast. No one really did it back in 2014. It’s still around. I still do episodes on The Science of Flipping. And that was how it started. It wasn’t with intention. It was just about giving. And I find that more and more in my life that the more I’m willing to just give with no real request or agenda, let’s call it, the more things work out for me, right? And the bigger plays happen. And so, that’s all it was.

And from there, people would hit me up, “Hey, dude, can you coach me, whatever?” And so, it kind of turned into a consulting business, like me teaching one person or whatever. Now, we teach thousands throughout the year in The Science Flipping community, and we have five to eight calls a week. But it started because of the podcast. And again, social media wasn’t that prevalent. I mean, 2014, it was more, for sure.

Brad Weimert: Definitely.

Justin Colby: But I just saw the podcast to be able to go national because I really didn’t know the power of social media then. But I realized, Apple Podcasts were getting really big. It was kind of the key thing. I was like, “That’d be cool,” right? It was a way to fulfill this desire or feeling I wanted to give back to others because I didn’t really know how else to do it. I didn’t know how to build a coaching business or anything like that. I didn’t have a mentor teaching me that. So, that’s how it all happened in 2014, kind of more consulting, now has grown into quite a large, amazing community. We focus on one first thing is finding the deal. How the hell do you do that, right?

And then you focus on analyzing video and then you focus on the exit. And that’s what I call being dynamic. Do you wholesale it? Do you fix and flip it? Or do you keep it as a rental? And if you can understand that, like I give all my community members my actual buy box, like I’d said early in the episode, I buy two to five properties a week. I want that to be five a week, and then I want it to be 10 a week, etc. But I say, “Hey, I’m going to teach you how to find them. And then I’m also going to tell you, I will likely buy it if it fits my buy box.” So, they have it. So, I don’t have to guess on what should I offer. They literally just type in four numbers and it goes green or it goes yellow or it goes red. If it goes red, that’s a hard no; yellow, maybe; green, yes.

Brad Weimert: So, let’s talk about real estate strategy. So, you’ve built this significant education platform to teach people how to invest in real estate. And you talked about the elements of a dynamic real estate investment, which is fix and flip, wholesale, or hold for appreciation. When do you do what? What is the approach that you teach? Because there are people that the cash flow is the important thing. There are people that– and that’s really the buy and hold if they can generate some cash flow. Some people, it’s a job. They’re doing it as a job to create revenue.

Justin Colby: That’s right.

Brad Weimert: And some people, the buy and hold also is the appreciation side of it, right? So, what’s the mix and how do you look at it?

Justin Colby: Yeah. Great question. The interesting thing is you can do all three at one time with any home that you want. And so, the BRRRR model, which I’m sure you’re familiar with, but for the audience, you buy it, rehab it, or rent it and refinance. That is the model I use to keep my rentals. I told you earlier, when I was rehabbing, I was wholesaling it to myself so you could wholesale into a rehab and then tell yourself, “Screw it, I’m going to keep it.”

Brad Weimert: Meaning that you buy it with one entity, you sell it to another entity and take a bunch of money.

Justin Colby: You contract it in one entity, you buy it in another entity where the wholesale fee comes from, and then you remodel it and do all that. You get it tenanted, and then you go to the bank and you refi and put it into a long-term loan.

Brad Weimert: Love it.

Justin Colby: Now, do I think that– so I’m just kind of highlighting, like actually, you could do all three models with one property, wholesale it, rehab it, and then actually just keep it versus selling it nonetheless, because the BRRRR model specifically, you’re rehabbing it anyways. And I really mean rehabbing. I’m not talking about just painting the cabinets white. I’m saying you remodel the home. I remodel every home I buy. Why? Because it gives me the exits. Do I want to fix and flip it and sell it? Or do I actually just want to hold it, which is what we’re talking about in this example? It gives me that option. If I want the option, now I have it.

And so, as a moment in time as we’re doing this recording, the interest rates have been going up, specifically not anymore, but they were over the last 12 months. Okay. Well, it made it a little bit more difficult as they were going up when I’m trying to keep a property and I go from 6.5% to 7.5% interest also, and I’m going to be netting like $80 a month on a rental. It’s not that appealing, right? Okay, but I have $38,000 of equity in this damn thing. After commissions and costs and all that, I’m just going to flip it then. So, now, I have both exit strategies that I can use. And so, I keep my buy box. It must exit both models, right?

So, I’m buying a lot through North Carolina, South Carolina, Florida, Alabama, Georgia. I like Oklahoma City, Tulsa. Dallas, I like, it just tends to be more of a flip market for me. It’s tough to get a rental there. So, when do you do what? It really just– you said something about cash flow. I tell all my community members, look at your bank account. They need some money. How’s it looking? Is it pretty dry? Flip it. Well, specifically, wholesale it, right? Wholesale it.

Now, if you’re looking okay and you see a project and I say you have to 5x your wholesale fee to make it worth it to fix and flip because it is brain damage. I am bold for a reason. I’ve done enough of these damn things and I still do them because I like torture, apparently. But if you could wholesale it for 10 grand, you need to be making 50 to rehab it. Otherwise, just damn wholesale it, right? But then, the buy and hold thing, for most people, they think they don’t have the money to buy and hold. This is another key thing that I tell people and teach people. There’s a lot of money out there.

Like, I literally just had my mastermind, part of my community. I have an inner circle. There’s 27 people there for this one in Vegas a couple of weeks ago. I told them, do the secret thing about make a very specific post into their social media, specifically Facebook, and then one guy got 17 people saying, “Hey, I’m interested in talking to you.” He’s like, “I had no idea I’d have this many people want to lend me money.” It’s like, because you don’t know what I know, right? And this is what I’m teaching them.

And I say that because he can go buy rentals with those people. You don’t need your own money. All my portfolio, the tens of millions of dollars that I have in one day, I should actually accumulate. How much do I have? None. There’s not a dollar of mine in any of them. Not one. But I know how to raise money and I know how to make it benefit both sides. I add value to both sides. There’s a lot of people with retirement accounts, the money’s just sitting there and likely losing money in the stock market. Likely.

But then there’s also a lot of people that have money in their bank. They’re scared of this or scared of that. Well, if their money’s protected by the actual asset and something did go wrong, at least they have the asset, right? And so, it really is a function of their bank account. And then knowing how to buy rentals, everyone in the universe should be buying at least a rental a year.

Brad Weimert: Okay. So, for you, personally, on your entrepreneurial journey, super heavy on your own investments, podcast starts. But now you’ve got an education platform that’s generating revenue. Which business model do you like? Do you like the real estate investment model more?

Justin Colby: I will do real estate for the rest of my life. Forever and always.

Brad Weimert: And what about the education side?

Justin Colby: I feel like I will. I think just like anything, it’ll have iterations of it. Could change a little bit. I don’t know how as a moment in time because we’re very heavy into the community. From this, internally, we built out kind of a technology internally for my real estate business, which started to get some eyes from out. People would ask me and I would coach them on what we’re doing. So, like in these masterminds, I’d say, “Here’s what we’re doing, here’s the technology behind, here’s–” and all of a sudden, people were like, “Oh, I want that.” We’ll start to get some noise and now, very, very, very recently, and I don’t know where this is going to go, I’ve gotten some interest from some very, very large people, let’s call them, that I didn’t even know I’d be in this space at all. And it is very real, very fast.

So, now, I’m in the tech space to some extent. We’ll see how that goes. Where it goes, I don’t know. However, you probably know, most of your listeners would know, that it can be a fun, wild ride. And there’s a whole lot of commas involved if it’s done right and it wasn’t my agenda.

Brad Weimert: Software side of things?

Justin Colby: Yeah, software. And again, it goes back to all I was trying to do is (a) fix a problem in my own business, and I fixed it. And then I shared with people what I did to fix the problem and that’s it. And I was just giving value to them, saying, “Hey, if you have this problem, here’s what I did to fix my problem. So, if you have it, fix it,” right? And again, like I say, the more I just give and show and offer value without any agenda, it always circles up.

Now, again, I don’t know where this is going to go, so I don’t want to be speculative or anything, but right now, it’s a very fun, cool, very hot and heavy thing that we are dealing with, very fast because there’s players that are like, this needs to run, this needs to go now. Here’s 10 more players. We’re having Zoom calls every single day. Right before this episode, I was on a very important Zoom call with people who have just had very large 10-figure exits. So, it’s fast and fun. And it also could go nowhere. And it just is a cool thing that I can offer my community. And that’s fine too, because it really does fix the problem.

Brad Weimert: I love it. So, I know we’ve got a cap on time here, but I have a couple of other questions. One of them is very pertinent to this moment, which is we’re in the beginning of 2024, we have had what we call a depressed real estate market in the last year or so, as a result of skyrocketing interest rates relative to our life cycle.

Justin Colby: That’s right.

Brad Weimert: Right? There’s investment regardless, investments to be had regardless of what cycle you’re in.

Justin Colby: That’s right.

Brad Weimert: How do you think about good markets and bad markets and real estate impacts your actions?

Justin Colby: You just adjust, right? So, like I said, I have a buy box, I get my community. You just adjust the interest rate. You adjust the holding cost. You just adjust. That’s it. You adapt. The reason why I’ve been able to last so long and so many, to your other point, like people fall out of favor, right? And it’s a large part because they don’t know what they’re doing and/or they’re so stoic and hardheaded that this is the way it crumbles on them. Like, if you don’t pivot, if you don’t adapt, if you don’t adjust, it’ll hurt you.

And so, in this season, I set up two exit strategies. So, if I’m buying something and I didn’t adjust, so at first, we were underwriting at 6.5%, then we had to go to 7.5%, then we had to go to 8.5%. Now, basically, I think, we’ve cooled off at this point, meaning I think it will start to slowly trickle down to all those things. But if it works at 8.5%, it’s a pretty good hedge, so it’s going to work. And then if we have our 40, 50 grand worth of net profit, then great. We’re just going to buy it because one of these is going to work for me. Makes sense?

Brad Weimert: Yeah.

Justin Colby: So, it’s hedging your exit, which is why I always want people to either wholesale, fix and flip, or buy and hold is because if you hedge with at least two of those, you’re going to be good. So, I don’t care. Now, listen, we’re old enough to have been kids, but in the late 80s, interest rates were in the high teens or low 20s. My grandfather was developing real estate back then, which did not give me any– there’s no connection to that. I was just, at random, he was. When I was kind of complaining one day, he’s 94, right? He was like, Justin, when I was developing his $2 million home back in the 80s, the interest rate for someone who buys it was 18.9%. Owner occupied. That was not hard money. He was like, “Stop b*tching,” right? Like 7.5% is not high. And if you look at the data, there’s a map or a chart over the last 50 years of interest rates, we’re still in a very low rate respectively, like it’s not 3%. But that was just ridiculous.

Brad Weimert: Yeah. That’s why I said in our life cycle, right? Because it’s jarring to us right now, especially coming off of 2.15%, 3% rates. But like you said, relative to the 80s…

Justin Colby: And math is math. If you protect yourself and are conservative and you use a spreadsheet, it just becomes math. Now, the thing that I’m going to be watching out for is income is not raising at the same rate as appreciation values of homes. But people are going to have to live places. This is why I’m actually choosing the place that I’m buying is because right now, there’s still favorable pricing. A family could go buy a home for 220 grand. We just sold one, 220 grand, beautiful home, three-bedroom, two-bath, 1,700 square feet. Families can afford that 220 grand, right?

And so, affordable housing, not in the Section 8 manor, but just like in the United States, I’m focusing on them because there will be a mass migration that way as the economy is going to– in my opinion, my opinion, our economy is going to be fine. It is fine. It’s going to continue to be fine. There is no big hurdle like you go– you’re in Miami right now. You go down to Brickell City Centre and there’s a whole lot of people in Louis, Gucci, and Prada, right? I mean, there’s a lot of money flowing right now.

Brad Weimert: No question. Okay, so when we started talking a couple of days ago about recording, I was met with a conversation around being on your podcast. And that was the beginning. And you were very protective about it because your podcast has gotten a ton of attention as of late. Tell me a little bit about, and to which I responded, “No, no, I want you to come talk to the Beyond a Million folks.” And you’re like, “Oh my God, I’m so sorry. I’m just getting bombarded with requests right now.”

Justin Colby: Totally. I want to say I’m sorry again, because it’s almost, I think about the convo. I was like, “God, I was douchey.” So, I’m sorry.

Brad Weimert: That’s totally fine. But it then becomes a discussion point, right? So, tell me about the podcast, tell me what the draw is for people and what you do with it. Then I want to talk kind of mechanics of how you built it and stuff.

Justin Colby: Totally. So, the podcast is a little bit of a passion project. A little while ago, several years ago, actually, I had this idea. And actually, to this moment as we’re recording, Spotify still has an old version of it. So, I organically launched this Entrepreneur DNA. And unfortunately, I don’t know why Spotify can’t take me down, but you’ll see because I have hair. So, you’ll know the difference.

So, I always had this. And as I’ve grown in business and my network has increased, I’m like, I need to do something with this passion. Like, this is legit going to help people and serve people and be something that people are going to want or hear. And it’s because I’m now getting to a place with the platform to have very notorietable, very well-to-do, very wealthy, very successful people that I can help spotlight for listeners. And I can go not specific to real estate, but I can go do business in entrepreneurship and what it really takes. Because, as you know, like I say all the time, it’s not always puppy dogs and rainbows, right? And there’s something a little wrong with those entrepreneurs that, to do what we need to do to get what we want to go get, it’s not easy. And people think it is because they see the edited version on social media. But that’s why I talk about my losses as much as I can. Like, oh, I just ate sh*t. Like, I just sold a duplex three months, two months ago, maybe. I had to cut a check to close it. I lost money, I didn’t care because the asset was not what I wanted and I was willing to lose money. It happens, right? It’s not always, oh, look how much money I made on this flip.

So, I had this passion project and I started asking people, like the Grant Cardone or the Ari Rastegar, or Sean Whalen and I’ve been friends for years and I’m like, “Hey, if I did this thing, would you jump on?” “Oh, yeah, bro.” And so, I was like, “F*ck it, I’m in.” And so, I started recording and finally, I got my sh*t together enough to say, “Hey, let’s go launch it.” And so, I essentially hired a full-blown marketing team to help me make sure that I’m going to achieve greatness with this. And it’s not just going to be another podcast because no one needs just another podcast, right?

So, I have a whole team that, for the guests, they get cut up snippets. It gives them all their social media posts that they could want to post and share and give for the guests, but then also, it helps get the podcast up and running and gaining notoriety. And as of yesterday, we hit number 10 in business and entrepreneurship in the nation, so I’m very excited about that. And it’s a combination of my marketing team and I think, the guest, essentially, and the content, people are like, “Oh, is it badass sh*t going on?” Like, Justin’s not just saying, “Hey, go out and win rah-rah,” right? It’s good stuff.

Brad Weimert: So, if you had to distill a few tips, what do you think the top 1, 2, 3 elements are that allow it to be or that have gotten it to be top 10 business podcast?

Justin Colby: Yeah. So, hiring a marketing team, focusing on this one vertical, not everything else is got to be part of it because it’s throwing the agenda, right? In navigating, there’s some secret science of how this all plays out, which I’m unaware of, but they’re focusing on it all the time to hit the algorithms, to do the things to, like, I just got Apple somehow has picked up whatever’s happening, so they put me in top and new podcast or whatever in some of the rankings. So, they are just focusing on it, right?

And then the other part is offering real f*cking value, like give the real sh*t, what people really want to know about what we do and how we do it. And again, not the puppy dogs and rainbows. And let’s talk about the best thing you’ve ever done. No, no, no. It was like, when I’m talking about Brad Lea and we’re talking about how he’s been divorced and how marriages aren’t working out, like the reality of this sh*t, right? Like, Brad’s not coming in and talking about how great Brad is, which he’s great. But I’m coming in hot about the commitment it takes to be a great father, a great husband, and a great business owner all at the same time and essentially having a child or a marriage of a business, right? And how do you do that? And how do you split yourself to do all these things? And he’s like, “Bro, when I was young, I didn’t f*cking got divorced over it. I couldn’t figure it out.”

And so, providing great content with the right people is a recipe that I have found. And so, hopefully, we keep this run and I’m going to keep spending it on my own team. And I think some of this, I’m at a place in my life financially where I can spend into a team to make that work. Some people might not be there and I can respect it, and hopefully, at least they can get the right content out there, again, offering value. It’s got to be of immense value, not just for my listeners, but for your listeners if you come on or anyone comes on, right?

And then to offer value to you, like, hey, it’s going to go on my YouTube. Brad will be on my YouTube. It’ll be on my podcast, it’ll be on my Instagram. Brad’s notoriety, based around my audience now can help fulfill what you’re looking to do and the agenda there, right? And so, just making sure the whole recipe is value for everyone, I think, has been part of it, where I didn’t have that initially. I didn’t have a team splicing video, making edits, and giving the raw footage to the other person and all this other stuff. It was just like, let’s record something and then…

Brad Weimert: Yeah, I think for people, unlike 2014, we’re now in an era 10 years later where it is a tremendously crowded space and it’s tremendously attractive to people because the idea of getting attention has become so popularized and people understand that that is eyeballs that can be converted. So, and the barrier to entry is low. You can upload a podcast to any of these distribution platforms. You can record with very low-cost equipment, get a budget thing out. But I think one of the key things that you just said was you had the marketing team there, and if you were going to do it, you wanted to f*cking do it. And the number one thing that crushes fledgling entrepreneurs is a fractured laser beam.

Justin Colby: I love that. Yeah, yeah. Love that.

Brad Weimert: They try to hit so many things at the same time and I’m totally guilty of it all the time.

Justin Colby: Me too.

Brad Weimert: I have a giant sign on my wall that says focus, because I need the reminder in the office to drop all of the other things and focus on the thing that’s relevant. So, if you’re going to do the podcast, you better know, let’s keep the energy.

Justin Colby: Let’s go. That’s it, right?

Brad Weimert: And so, you have to commit to doing it.

Justin Colby: Totally. I couldn’t agree with more. And it’s funny that you say that. It’s because any time I see I’m not getting any, not just in the podcast, but like things aren’t really working just because I’m fractioned. I’m not really extremely focused. And I heard this years and years ago from one of my first mentors, extreme focus gets extreme results. And that was my intention with this, right, is Science of Flipping is still a great podcast and is there and we still do episodes every week.

But how I started that versus this with intention in knowing the vertical when we had that conversation like, “Hey, bro, I’m getting crushed on,” is because I set out with intention of what I’m going to do, what I’m going to make this, how this is going to be a value add to you, the guest, me, my audiences, and then the people listening, it was just with incredible intention, right? And I kept that intention and I still have that intention. And so, now I have something that has become pretty darn special and I appreciate it. And I think it’s really cool. And when you say what happens with education, I mean, it could just be the Joe Rogan style, like, I just build a f*cking podcast. It’s so good and delivers so much value all the time. That’s where I go in the transition of where I go with education. I don’t know the answer to the second, but maybe, I don’t know if I’ll ever be Joe Rogan, but that’s right.

Brad Weimert: Well, you’d have to…

Justin Colby: Do something really special.

Brad Weimert: Chop, chop your legs down about 10 inches.

Justin Colby: Yeah. Throw some muscle on.

Brad Weimert: Yeah. Awesome. Justin, where do you want to point people? If they want to find out more about you, where should they go?

Justin Colby: TheJustinColby is the best to handle, Instagram specifically. I rock out as much content on there as possible. And then JustinColby.tv would be a great place if you just want to get to know more about me. I have hundreds and hundreds of videos on JustinColby.tv, and subscribe and just learn more about me and see if I’m your vibe or not. Either way, I wish everyone the best.

Brad Weimert: Love it. Justin, awesome to see you, man.

Justin Colby: Thank you, brother. Appreciate you.